Re: Bob v0.1.0 ready for beta testing

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%pkgsrc.org@localhost>]

* On 2025-12-29 at 21:29 GMT, David Brownlee wrote:

> - Is it recommended to "cargo install pkgbob" and all other steps as
> root (docs imply but do not state)

Not necessarily.  cargo defaults to installing to your home directory, 
but as long as you have PATH set correctly the installed binary can be 
owned by any user, or install as non-root and run everything as 'sudo 
bob', etc.

> - The setup notes for "bob init <path>" do not mention that <path>
> must not already be present - might it be possible to for it also
> accept an empty dir?

Ok, I'll add this.

> - Would it be possible to clarify how "ensure that their home
> directory is created inside the sandbox" might best be managed - I set
> the build user but did not do anything specific to create a home
> directory inside the sandbox and all seems to work?

Yeh I need better wording.  Basically if you enable unpriv builds then 
you need to make sure you also create anything it might need in each 
sandbox, but you're right that it doesn't necessarily need a home 
directory, it's just that mine do, and often require additional setup 
work, e.g.:

  https://github.com/TritonDataCenter/pkgbuild/blob/master/scripts/mksandbox-macos#L123-L132

> - I have a reasonably large (~57G) tmpfs which I had been using via
> WRKOBJDIR?=/var/obj/pkg - would it make sense to just set basedir
> under the tmpfs

You could do.  The design is meant to be flexible so you can configure 
it exactly to suit your preferred layout, but also I really want a 
default config that works out of the box with ideally zero changes to 
make it as easy as possible to get up and running.

At this stage the initdir is almost certainly going to change until we 
reach version 1 as there are more things I need to add to config and 
scripts, but once it's reasonably stable then it could be held under 
revision control, and you could have multiple directories for different 
builds, e.g. netbsd-10, netbsd-11, netbsd-10-2025Q4, etc.

> - While it is obvious from the config.lua, it might be nice to note in
> the docs which config values (such WRKOBJDIR and MAKE_JOBS) are
> overridden by bob, and under which circumstances (presumably if the
> config sets with ?= they will be overridden, but not with =)

Yeh this one is tricky as some can be overridden, some can't, and some 
can only be set in the environment (hence scanenv for NATIVE_OPSYS etc).

I don't think we can reasonably come up with a comprehensive list here, 
but in my mind the general rule here is that you should set things in 
mk.conf that are permanent decisions that you have made for that 
particular package set (i.e. things that if you change you would need to 
rebuild lots of packages), and the environment is for ephemeral things 
like MAKE_JOBS that could be set in mk.conf, but having lua and access 
to the ScanIndex variables means you have a lot more power and 
flexibility in setting them.  As with many things in bob this comes 
from my extensive experience with pbulk, and in this case having to 
manage hundreds of lines of mk.conf.  It's going to be so nice to have 
this reduce down to a few lines of lua.

--
Jonathan Perkin                    pkgsrc.smartos.org
Open Source Complete Cloud   www.tritondatacenter.com